<p><strong>Pleasanton, CA</strong><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"> Safeway Inc. has once again reinforcing its commitment to sustainability and the environment. The company has announced that it has transitioned to using reusable product containers to ship produce. The RPCs will completely replace corrugated boxes, to ship produce from the farm fields, through the distribution channel and to finally to the Safeway locations. With this transition, the company will eliminate the use of over 17 million pounds of corrugated boxes, accroding to a press release.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"> IFCO Systems, the company's major supplier of RPCs, notes that Safeway's implementation of RPC usage to decrease waste was the fastest and most aggressive program roll-out to date. Today, many types of produce travel from the field, to the distributor, to Safeway's product distribution centers and to the final store location in RPCs. Safeway, which has introduced a broad range of successful sustainability practices across its operations, has used RPCs for decades on many of its consumer brand categories, including bread, milk and soda.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Making the transition for produce was a more complicated process than for other products because, to make it effective and decrease cardboard usage, Safeway's distributors and grower partners also had to commit to the switch.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"> Safeway Vice President of Transportation Tom Nartker said, "This expansion into produce is a natural extension of best practices in logistics," said Mr. Nartker. "Safeway will continue to look for opportunities to expand the usage of RPCs into additional categories to have an even greater positive environmental impact."</p><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><p><a class="btn btn-sm btn-primary col-lg-12" style="white-space: normal;" href="http://www.safeway.com" target="_new"> Safeway</a></p><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">
